A Walking Girl
by Mandi5
Summary: I'm new to The Walking Dead - only halfway through season 3 - but I love it. I'm hooked. But I have this idea that some part of the human inside the walker is still there. Buried deep inside. It worries me. It means they can plan and reason and think about their attacks and their methods of obtaining food. It's not one of my happier ideas. Please read & review!


**A Walking Girl.**

The memories were the worst part. The memories and the hunger. Don't forget the hunger. How could she? It was the one thing that ruled her life. It ruled her every thought and her every action. It was instinct. It was the basic human need for sustenance.

Funny how, in this respect, she was still so very like a human.

But in every other respect she was nothing like a human. All the trappings of humanity – all the desires and needs – love, want, fear, comfort, passion, ambition – were gone now. The basic things that were part and parcel of daily life were gone. Never to return.

She was no longer human. So what was she? Who was she? She didn't know. She couldn't reason it out. She knew what she had been, what she once was, but she couldn't understand what she was now. Here. Today. At this very moment.

Once she had been Linda. She had been twenty-six and full of life. She had been full of dreams, and hopes, and ambitions. She dreamed of love. She dreamed of travel. She wanted to see the four corners of the earth. All the cities and the mountains and the oceans. She wanted to meet people and learn about their different cultures and their lives.

She loved humanity. She wanted to embrace all of it, and live in it and alongside it and be a part of it, because that's what she was - a vital part of humanity. She was a human being.

She'd worked in a pet supply store. She remembered that she had loved animals. Since early childhood there had always been animals of some kind in her life - dogs, cats, rabbits, horses. She had loved them all and vowed that she would never intentionally harm a single animal. She had been a vegetarian.

* * *

That Linda was gone now. What was here instead was - something else.

Something she didn't, or couldn't, understand. All she knew was what drove her. And that was hunger. A terrible, aching, all-encompassing, driving hunger.

Was she a step up on the evolutionary scale? Or a step backwards? She didn't know.

All she knew was that there were others like her. Many more walking souls, always journeying forward, slowly marching towards the things that called them forward.

The things that called them forward were the others. The people. The humans.

They were those who hadn't been changed. They were still human and they were those who still had lives and were able to live them. They lived and loved. They had friends and hopes and dreams for their futures. There were fewer of them now. Almost three years of her kind's hunger had decimated their ranks, while her kind's number grew almost daily.

She hated the humans.

They didn't believe she could hate. They believed that it was only the hunger that drove her towards them. But it was more than hunger. It was hatred because they now had what she had lost.

She was in a forest. The warm sun was above her as she walked through the trees. Mighty oaks that once had seen civilisations rise and fall. Their canopy of green dappled the sunlight as she walked beneath them. Another civilisation had now fallen. The human race. It was gone, never to return. Her kind had risen and now they would rule.

* * *

The walker that once had been Linda sniffed the air as she walked along. The need was great now. It had been many days or weeks since she had last fed. She couldn't remember how long it had been since she had found a half-dead collie dog with a broken leg. It had snarled at her, but she had stroked and soothed it before she bit into its flesh – ripping through matted fur and skin - tearing at muscles and organs, warm with pulsing blood.

The human – the one called Linda - that she had been had once owned a collie dog.

She walked on. The memory of the dog was gone now – nothing more than her last meal. It was nothing more than a taste. Nothing more than a slight abatement of the never-abating hunger that consumed her and drove her ever forward.

Memories were fragile. They fleeted in and out of what was left of her mind. The reminded her that she had once been Linda but they told her that Linda as gone forever. Linda and her collie dog and her horse, and the rabbits she had been breeding to sell in the pet supply store.

She didn't care. She didn't care that she had once been Linda and that she had loved animals and had wanted to travel the world.

This was her world now. Walking through the forests and the dead, decaying cities and towns – searching for the last remnants of the humanity she had once embraced and been a vital part of.

The hunger drove her towards them.

* * *

She sniffed the air again. This time she was rewarded. Fresh blood. Warm blood. Living human flesh.

There was more than one of them. There were several, of different age groups and sex. One was an infant – newly born into this terrible world.

She felt them. She sensed them. They were clinging to each other, protecting each other and surviving together in this world that no longer belonged to them.

Behind walls and wire, they thought they were safe.

The walker that now bore only a slight resemblance to the human being that had once been called Linda listened to the hunger inside her.

It drove her towards them.

She continued walking.

The end.

A. Sheridan 21st Aug. 2013.


End file.
